ABSTRACT
Free trade was one of the foundation stones of Britain’s nineteenth-century social order. As the first industrial country, Britain had also become the first major exporter of manufactures and had followed this by becoming the world’s leading international service centre. As a result, the vested interests of business in free imports of food and raw materials were far more varied and powerful in Britain than elsewhere and free trade was a key element in reconciling business to the social order in mid-Victorian Britain. Free trade also had a wider cross-class appeal. It was immensely popular with skilled working men not just because it brought cheap supplies of food but also because protectionism was associated in Britain with the defence of landed privilege and with the aristocratic, ‘tax eating’, warmongering state which Cobbett and Paine had railed against as ‘Old Corruption’. Anti-aristocratic feeling was also the basis of Cobden’s and Bright’s middle-class, free-trade cosmopolitanism, which, in its turn, underlay the Spencerian distinction between traditionally ‘militant’, or aristocratic-authoritarian, states which were perpetually at war with each other, and modern ‘industrial’ or small-scale, market-driven ones. Industrial societies were becoming steadily more involved in a global division of labour which radicals believed was materially beneficial to all who participated in it and also created an interdependence that would eventually make war between nations unthinkable.1 This ideology of ‘industrialism’, uniting capitalists and workers in a ‘producers’ alliance’ against inherited privilege, was central to Gladstonian liberalism in its heyday in the 1870s with its emphasis on the ‘free breakfast table’ and the small state: and its power was widely diffused enough to ensure that, despite its strong aristocratic connections, the Conservative party was forced to accept these central precepts of Gladstonianism.2
